


Blessed Ghost

by sapphireswimming



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Angst, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Gen, Gen Work, Ghost Hunting, Ghost Maddie Fenton, Hurt/Comfort, Jack and Maddie Fenton are legit paranormal scientists, One Shot, Protective Jazz Fenton, The Nature of Ghosts, painful painful irony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23046949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphireswimming/pseuds/sapphireswimming
Summary: After waking up five feet above her bed, Maddie is forced to rethink everything she has ever known about ghosts.
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Jazz Fenton, Danny Fenton & Maddie Fenton, Danny Phantom & Maddie Fenton
Comments: 2
Kudos: 57
Collections: Collabs and Challenges with DannyPhantomSG1





	Blessed Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6987808/11/Phantasmic-Images
> 
> DannyPhantomSG1's (@Danny Phantom SG-1 on fanfiction.net) corresponding oneshot collection was originally posted here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6972859/1/Informal-Inspirations
> 
> Prompt: _"I moved, and could not feel my limbs: / I was so light -almost / I thought that I had died in sleep, / And was a blessed ghost."_ \- Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge

* * *

Maddie woke with a start, her heart racing as she gasped for breath. She was dizzy and couldn't really feel her limbs. Everything was far too light... She put her hands beside her to steady herself, but they didn't land on anything.

She stopped.

That didn't make any sense.

How could her hand not land on anything? She was right here in bed, comfortably situated atop several mattresses. There should be those old striped sheets crumpled in her fist right now... except they weren't.

After blinking several times, she looked down to find out why this was the case, only to wish she hadn't. The bed was there, yes...

Five feet below her.

She did the obvious thing and panicked.

A small scream accompanied her flailing arms and she twisted around in the air as she completely lost her balance. But she didn't fall. She remained hovering over the bed with her still-sleeping husband in his fuzzy pink pajamas just a few feet below her.

Thank goodness he was a heavy sleeper. Heaven only knows what he would do if he found his wife floating mid-air. She gulped. He would have the Bazooka out before she could say "ghost!"

Calming herself, she finally found her equilibrium as she lay in a very undignified spread-eagle position. Slowly, she adjusted until she was more or less sitting in the air.

This was all just too bizarre. Why on earth was she floating? What had happened to her?

She ran through a mental checklist, trying to figure it out. She hadn't gotten caught by any of their inventions.

None of the food had been glowing, well not more than usual, and anyway, Jack and the kids had eaten everything she did and they certainly weren't floating. At least, Jack wasn't, but perhaps, she mused, it would take a lot more of the stuff in order to make him start floating. She didn't know about Jazz and Danny yet. Oh, she should check on them...

Now she just had to figure out how to move...

It shouldn't be that difficult, really, you just, you know, move. You think about it or something. But that didn't do much. She smiled wryly. Self teleportation was not an ability granted via glowing food even if floating-slash-flying was.

Huh, she stopped. Was this flying? _Could_ she fly, or was she doomed to merely float? Well, it would certainly be fun to fly. But how to actually activate the motion?

An idea passed through her head and despite how embarrassing it was, it was the only one she had at the moment so she acted on it.

Stretching out into a Superman position, she squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for all that she was worth that one: she would get somewhere with all this and two: that no one would ever know to what lengths she had gone to figure this out.

It didn't seem like it was working, though; there was no air rushing past her face and she still felt like she was lying on nothing. She sighed. So much for that idea.

Next she tried swimming, doing the breaststroke through the air and feeling utterly ridiculous as she did the whole thing with the frog legs while only moving forward and inch or two at a time. At least she was moving now; that was the upside, she supposed.

She took a look at Jack, still snoring on the bed. He looked so different from up in the air. Everything did. It was like she was in an entirely different room. And... was that... her tin of peppermint fudge on top of the bureau? She shook her head, chuckling.

As she looked forward again, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and would have started laughing at how silly she looked if she hadn't realized then what was wrong.

She did a double take. Then a triple take.

No. No, that couldn't be right.

Staring back at her from the mirror was a woman with buttery skin, golden hair, and a pale but glowing orange body suit. It was as if her normal attire had completely inverted colors. Even her goggles, normally an orange-ish red were now a bright, bright blue, almost the color of Danny's eyes. But what did that even mean? And how on earth had that happened?

She would have blamed the mirror, said that it had ecto-contaminants in it, except that nothing else in the reflection had changed from its normal color. Just her.

And then... she was glowing.

Holy— she was glowing! She looked just like a ghost.

That was the last straw.

Floating she could handle, having her suit inverted was fine, but looking like a ghost? She hunted ghosts. She couldn't _be_ one!

Thinking back through all of her lectures in college, all of the theories she and Jack had worked on, she tried to make sense of it all, explain it somehow. She couldn't actually be a ghost unless she had a particularly painful death—and since she couldn't remember even dying, she doubted that it was painful enough to give her an automatic pass to ghost-dom—or unless she had a lot of unfinished business...

Well, that made her stop because she did. She had plenty of unfinished business with that ghost boy. And trying to rid Amity Park of the specters that haunted it... and all of her unfinished projects with Jack... and yes, come to think about it, she had plenty of unfinished business.

Geez— no wonder she was a ghost.

It came at her like a smack across the face. She had been obsessed with ghosts while she was alive. Now... was she doomed to be obsessed with them now that she was... dead? Become a ghost ghost, doomed to hate and obsess over the very thing that she had become.

She didn't feel particularly ghostly. She just felt like Maddie... hovering in the air.

But she wasn't a human any more. That's what the data told her. She couldn't really still be alive and exhibit the symptoms of a ghost, the glowing, the floating. Humans were alive without these qualities and ghosts were dead with them. There was no in between. It was scientifically impossible. She was dead. And she was a ghost—the very thing that she had hunted all her life.

Did that mean... if she really was a ghost... she was as evil as every other ghost out there? Was she nothing more than an evil manifestation of ectoplasm? That was the definition of a ghost, but surely she was something more. There had to be something more. She wasn't evil. She hadn't changed. She was herself still, just... a little dead.

She didn't feel like destroying anything and she didn't even have an urge to scare anyone. She didn't want to blast Jack for snoring or make Bearbert float through Jazz's room or say boo while floating invisibly by Danny's ear.

No, none of that appealed to her at all. She just wanted to be normal again. Oh good Lord, she didn't want to be dead. She didn't want to be a ghost. Ghosts were evil and she wasn't evil. She wasn't...

She was so lost in some form of shock that she didn't hear the door creak open or the footsteps or whispers coming into the room. She didn't turn around until she heard a soft beeping and the hum of one of her ghost weapons warming up.

"Jazz? Danny?"

They looked up at her with wide eyes, surprised and suspicious. They both carried one of the deadly weapons that she had always hoped they would want to wield. But did they have to choose now to start taking an interest in what she had said? Why, oh why did it have to be tonight?

Jazz took the lead, overprotective of her brother as always. "Who are you?"

She was shocked and her mouth hung open for a minute. Did they really not recognize her? Had she really changed that much? She didn't think so... just different colors, a little bit of a glow... and the fact that she was hovering in the air... but she still looked the same.

"It's your mother. Maddie Fenton."

Danny lowered his weapon, looking very uncomfortable with the whole situation. It would have made Maddie's heart soar if the movement wasn't counterbalanced by Jazz's insistence on making her aim more accurate.

"You're not Mom. You're just some malignant ectoplasmic residue. And we're going to have to send you back to the Ghost Zone where you belong!"

"No! Please, look, I swear, I'm not an evil ghost. I just woke up like this. I think I ate something that glowed too much last night."

"Hey, Mom's cooking isn't that bad!" Jazz defended quickly. A pause. "And you don't fool us."

"But I'm not trying to fool you. I'm your mother. I don't want this any more than you do. I just want to figure out what's going on."

"Rule number one of ghost hunting: all ghosts are evil. Do not be distracted by their pleas of innocence."

"But I'm not evil!"

She couldn't believe it. Her own daughter was turning a blind eye to what was in front of her. What happened to her belief in going through all of the evidence, not jumping to conclusions, giving everyone a chance, that maybe not all ghosts were evil?

"I'm not evil, Jazz-sweetie."

Her daughter's glare hardened and so she turned to her son, glowing tears streaming down her face.

"Danny? You believe me don't you?"

"Rule number two of ghost hunting: ghosts don't feel emotion, but they show it to trick humans. Don't be deceived. Don't listen to it, Danny."

"I'm not an 'it', I'm your mother. Now, please, just don't shoot and help me get down to the lab and maybe we can find something that will reverse all of this."

"Ha! The Lab. Of course that's just where you want us to take you. Right to the center of all our family's equipment and experiments. There's no way I'm letting you get your hands on those, spook!"

"Jazz, maybe this isn't such a great idea."

That's it, Danny. That's my boy.

"Maybe... we should wake Dad up. He'll know what to do."

Oh no. That was not good. Jack, though she loved him dearly, shot first and ate fudge later.

"No, no! Don't wake up Jack. Not yet. I don't want him to see me like this."

"Aha. That's rule number three: find out a ghost's purpose, in this case the lab, and their fear, the ghost-hunting Fentons. We've got her now. Wake him up."

Maddie tried to keep Danny from doing it, but she couldn't really do anything herself and every time she even tried to move, Jazz would point her gun at her.

Jack sprang out of bed with a great cry of "GHOST!" and had soon added his own blazing weapon to those of her children.

She knew that their weapons shouldn't hurt her. She was still herself. She wasn't a ghost. She couldn't be a ghost. And those weapons didn't hurt humans. She knew that. She should because they were her plans. But that scientific knowledge didn't do much to help the feeling that grew in the pit of her stomach as she found herself facing the business end of a bazooka.

What made it even worse was the fact that they were wielded by her own family.

And their inventions had honed in on Danny before. Oh, gosh, had this been what it was like for him? Growing up never knowing when your own parents would end up shooting you at point blank range, even if it wasn't on purpose? No wonder he had grown so far apart from them these past years. She would do the same if she thought it would make her life longer.

And so she was pulled back to the situation at hand. She was going to die. Well, she didn't really know if ghosts could die again, but, she didn't want to be the one to find out.

She didn't want to die.

She didn't want to be studied under a microscope.

She didn't want to be pulled apart molecule by molecule.

But nothing she said or did convinced the people in front of her—her husband and her children—that they shouldn't do those things.

Their eyes were hard and their weapons firmly trained on her. She couldn't move, because she didn't know how and they would shoot her if she tried.

She couldn't explain because she didn't know what was going on and they wouldn't listen.

She didn't know how long she was sitting there, crying, waiting for her loved ones to pull the trigger as they decided to advance on her. She didn't want to see it when they actually decided to do it, so she closed her eyes and curled into a ball.

Slowly, she surrendered to the inevitable, letting the dark wash over her, drowning out all noise and focusing very hard on nothing.

When it came, she didn't expect it to feel cool, tingling, almost. It was a strange sensation, but definitely a welcome once since she had been expecting searing heat and pain. And then came the rushing, as if she were being pulled away to another place, passing through space and time to meet... whatever was on the other side.

She let herself relax a bit and give in to the exhilarating feeling she had tried to imitate earlier with her attempts at flying. So this is what it felt like to die... to fly...

Soon, the feeling left her, as if she were slowing down. She didn't want to slow down, though. She didn't want to face whatever was coming next. She wanted to lose herself forever in that feeling, that feeling of exhilaration and weightlessness. She could forget herself; forget the glares of hatred and the feeling of utter despair.

When she remembered that, all she wanted to do was curl up into a ball and sob her heart out. So that was what she did, this time uninhibited by fear of anyone watching or disturbing her.

Her eyes finally dried up and Maddie became more conscious of the world around her.

Without lifting her head, she could tell that she was laying on something hard, like concrete. There was a soft breeze playing with her tousled hair.

She sat up and found to her surprise, that she was not in heaven or the Ghost Zone or some beyond realm. She was still in the real world. In fact, she was still in Amity Park, on top of a building and sheltered from the world by the billboard proclaiming the town a great place to live.

She blinked, very confused. Why was she here, of all places? And how had she gotten here?

That question was either answered or thrown from her mind when a voice spoke beside her.

"Are... are you okay?"

She was up in a shot, in a defensive position, and very happy to find that she once again had both feet on the ground.

The speaker put his hands up to show that he meant no harm.

It was the last person she had ever expected to see right now. Phantom.

She didn't let her guard down at all. He was still her enemy; she had hunted him far too often for him to be wanting to ally with her.

Why he didn't shoot her while she was down was beyond her. Unless he wanted to satisfaction of watching her suffer even more. She didn't doubt it.

She pulled herself together surprisingly quickly.

"What do you want?" she snapped.

He backed up a step to show that he wasn't a threat but also that he had no intention of leaving.

"I just wanted to see if you were okay..."

"Ha!" She scoffed. "You wanted to see if I was okay?"

He deflated and took another half step backwards.

"Yes. Is that really so hard to believe?"

"Yes it is. You are a ghost."

"So are you." He countered.

"You are my enemy."

"You were never mine."

He looked serious when he said it, wistful too, almost sad. It wasn't what she expected. Then again, none of this had been what she had expected. Here was Phantom and he hadn't even tried to shoot her.

"Why didn't you shoot me while I was down?"

The ghost snorted. "If I wanted you to be shot, I would have let the Fentons do it."

She was so shocked at the meaning behind that statement that she lost her defensive pose.

"You mean... you stopped them from shooting?"

"Well, not from shooting. There are probably a bunch of holes in your walls, but kept them from shooting at you, yes."

"I... I don't understand..."

He smiled tightly. "I didn't expect you to. Not yet, anyway. But we're not all the same, we ghosts." He licked his lips and looked at her nervously. "I'm... I'm going to sit down, is that okay with you?"

"Yeah..."

"Right. Well, um... do you... want to talk about it?"

She was lost. "Talk about it?"

He quickly tried to explain. "Well, only if you want to. I know a lot of ghosts don't want to talk about how they died or what happened right afterwards, so I completely understand if you don't want to..."

That wasn't the point she was hung up on, however.

"With you?" she asked, rather incredulously.

"Why not with me? I _am_ the only person around..."

She was drawn to answer him almost without thinking, but then caught herself. What was she doing? She couldn't open up to a ghost about her family problems! Public enemy number one! The slimy scumbag would probably...

But... was that really what he was? Was that really what she was?

No, no, it couldn't be! It wasn't!

Not all ghosts were evil. It wasn't true! It wasn't true.

Even though that was what her life's work amounted to, it meant less than nothing to her after her death. Even though all of the empirical, scientific evidence pointed to the fact that every spirit was malevolent, she couldn't see it, couldn't feel it now. And she had to believe her senses.

All at once, the world came tumbling down around her. Everything she had ever thought, ever felt, gone. The foundation of her beliefs crumbled. She knew that she had been wrong. She just knew. Not that it would help her now...

Tears filled her eyes as she realized the hopelessness of the situation. Phantom blurred and swirled in her vision until he had disappeared.

It wouldn't help her, but she wasn't evil!

Her hands fisted and she squeezed her eyes tight shut. She was ready to hyperventilate again, her limbs losing their feeling and her head fogging up until she could hold onto nothing except for a single thought.

She wasn't evil.

She wasn't.

She wasn't...

...

Maddie woke with a start.


End file.
